Tuesday, 15 September 2015

Subtitled "Big ideas from the computer age", the book considers the social and psychological factors that encourage start-up companies, then provides opinions on computing languages. The author's start-up company produced what he considers the first web-based app. It was written mostly in Lisp. He sold out to Yahoo.

The nature of programming

When I finished grad school in computer science I went to art school to study painting ... Hacking and painting have a lot in common. In fact, of all the different types of people I've known, hackers and painters are among the most alike (p.18)

Because hackers are makers rather than scientists, the right place to look for metaphors is not in the sciences, but among other kinds of makers (p.25)

hackers start original, and get good, and scientists start good, and get original (p.26)

Computer science is a grab bag of tenuously related areas thrown together by an accident of history, like Yugoslavia ... It's as if mathematicians, physicists, and architects all had to be in the same department (p.18)

Languages

A language can be very abstract, but offer the wrong abstracts. I think this happens in Prolog, for example (p.150)

Inspired largely by the example of Larry Wall, the designer of Perl, lots of hackers are thinking, why can't I design my own language? ... The result is ... a language whose inner core is not very well designed, but which has enormously powerful libraries of code for solving specific problems (p.153)

Cobol, for all its sometime popularity, does not seem to have any intellectual descendants ... I predict a similar fate for Java (p.155)

I have a hunch that the main branches of the evolutionary tree pass through the languages that have the smallest, cleanest cores. The more of a language you can write in itself, the better (p.157)

Semantically, strings are more or less a subset of lists in which the elements are characters ... Having strings in a language seems to be a case of premature optimization .... Instead ... have just lists, with some way to give the compiler optimization advice that will allow it to lay out strings as contiguous bytes if necessary (p.160)

Somehow the idea of reusability got attached to object-oriented programming in the 1980s, and no mount of evidence to the contrary seems to be able to shake it free. But although some object-oriented software is reusable, what makes it reusable is its bottom-upness (p.163)

There seem to be a huge number of new programming languages lately. Part of the reason is that faster hardware has allowed programmers to make different tradeoffs between speed and convenience (p.164)

The trend is not merely toward languages being developed as open source projects rather than "research," but toward languages being designed by the application programmers who need to use them, rather than by compiler writers (p.166)

Lisp was a piece of theory that unexpectedly got turned into a programming language (p.186)

Lisp started out powerful, and over the next twenty years got fast. So-called mainstream languages started out fast, and over the next forty years gradually got more powerful, until now the most advanced of them are fairly close to Lisp. Close, but they are still missing a few things (p.186)

Perl ... was not only designed for writing throwaway programs, but was pretty much a throwaway program itself (p.206)

in practice a good profiler may do more to improve the speed of actual programs written in the language than a compiler that generates fast code (p.209)

Misc

This is the Computer Age. It was supposed to be the Space Age, or the Atomic Age (p.ix)

research must be original - and as anyone who has written a PhD dissertation knows, the way to be sure you're exploring virgin territory is to stake out a piece of ground that no one wants (p.20)

two guys who thought Multics excessively complex went off and wrote their own. They gave it a name that was a joking reference to Multics: Unix (p.52)

If you want to keep your money safe, do you keep it under your mattress at home, or put it in a bank? This argument applies to every aspect of server administration: not just security, but uptime, bandwidth, load management, backups, etc. (p.75)

The average end user may not need the source code of their word processor, but when you really need reliability, there are solid engineering reasons for insisting on open source (p.149)

As technologies improve, each generation can do things that the previous generation would have considered wasteful (p.159)